


Ballast

by Morbane



Category: Emelan - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Constructive Criticism Welcome, Gen, Lightsbridge, Post-Canon, Present Tense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-28
Updated: 2015-06-28
Packaged: 2018-04-06 17:04:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4229853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morbane/pseuds/Morbane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tris and the problems of attending Lightsbridge incognito.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ballast

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Coppercrow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Coppercrow/gifts).



Trisana Chandler is a weather mage, a prodigy who scries the winds.

Seldry Teller is a quiet young woman with a round body, sharp eyes, and not a speck of ordinary magic.

There are many similar students at Lightsbridge. They will earn a prestigious title, but no mage accreditation. Some of them have political purposes: they are scions of merchant clans who have no desire to be cheated when trading magical goods, or they are young and non-inheriting children of noble families whose theoretical knowledge of magic may protect their families’ power. Others are here to learn because they love learning. 

Tris doesn’t understand those students very well. 

However, they think they understand Seldry.

Tris has always loved reading, and loved learning, but what most engages her imagination is _doing_. She loves reading between the lines of a dry tome to discover practicality and purpose. She wants to know the how of things.

Because Seldry Teller loves reading, the bookish students at Lightsbridge think she is one of them, although most of them are more concerned with what and why. 

It is no terrible thing to be a lover of books at Lightsbridge. Seldry has turned this to her advantage many times, especially when correcting an impression about ambient magic.

“Oh, but I read somewhere that…” she says, when what she means is, _I did that_.

However, there are very few books about ambient magic at Lightsbridge - well, very few by Tris’s standards. It isn’t hard to claim she’s read all that are available here, but it’s hard to twist the impoverished arguments they offer into facts that explain all of her certainties.

( _Trying_ rather improves her essay technique.)

She writes to Niko to complain about this. After all, Niko emerged from Lightsbridge with a nuanced appreciation of ambient magic; there ought to be some resource allocation. (She also writes to Daja requesting that Daja send all rest of the books from No. 6 Cheeseman street - the few Tris didn’t previously pack to take with her.)

Niko suggests in reply that Seldry could make a career of writing academic books about ambient magic, and it gives her pause. 

Writing a book is a rather weighty way to establish her name, she thinks. Not necessarily the impact of reputation - it might be forgotten, or maybe no one will read it - but the work that is thereby credited to that name. So much investment, that once might have been channeled into being herself.

But Seldry is the self she means to be in future: learned and disciplined and restrained.

* * *

Before Tris went to Lightsbridge, the most complicated preparation concerned dyeing her hair.

She spent all of Seed Moon squeezing power out of her hair. Drawing on the weather forces she had stored exhausted her, so she could only drain off a little at a time. She knew that hair was dead matter, but without magic in it, it felt lifeless for the first time. She had used her hair as her mage's kit for years.

A Living Circle Earth dedicate called Dew prepared the dye, and helped Tris's foster siblings work to apply it. After a week, Tris cautiously began to gather power back in. Some of her braids had previously held forces from deep in the ground, or from violent storms. Those were not easy to replenish.

Her altered hair was not as easy to fill with power. Tris tried to describe the difference to Briar. "It's as if my hair was metal before, and I mixed it with flax, or hay."

"You don't make a lightning rod out of wood," Daja agreed. "You make it out of copper." She grinned at Tris.

"Don't worry," Briar drawled. "I can tell you're still Coppercurls underneath."

* * *

At first, Seldry feels inconsequential.

She is a student among students at Lightsbridge; that is ordinary and inconsequential enough, but if she can settle into this skin, it will be a real and weighty accomplishment.

Tris is a mage of lightning and thunder and gale; she is a storm, and Seldry feels like a piece of chaff she could smash away. Seldry has no powers and no history.

(“From Capchen,” she says, and when asked about herself and her family, she says that she has two sisters and a brother, because that will _always_ be true of her.)

She is a thin veil over a woman who doesn’t want to be a war mage, and sometimes it takes all of Tris’ self-discipline not to blow that veil aside. 

Tris can help people. Tris can explain things, set protections, use her experience in ways that matter.

But Seldry shouldn't need that experience to stand on her own two feet.

Amid all the temptations to prove herself, to cut through misconceptions, and lend herself to real workings, Tris returns to Seldry.

Tris is a wind, and Seldry walks on the earth, and if she gives enough to Seldry, lives Seldry enough, Seldry will ground her - will become a foundation to rest on, a place to return to, a home to live in.

She only hopes to bite her tongue and learn enough to give Seldry time to grow into her power.


End file.
